Month: November 2014

These are all important things. They’re things we need and want. But they’re also brief things. They’re intermittent and unpredictable things. They’re things that the Apple watch will be able to do more efficiently — maybe even better.

I’ve told many of these stories before:

My mother wants an Apple Watch so she can get the iPhone 6 Plus, leave it in her purse, and not have to worry about missing messages or calls.

My sister currently uses a Pebble because her hospital’s paging system runs on the iPhone but she doesn’t want to carry it with her on rounds.

A friend who jogs is dreaming for the day he can leave home without having to carry his phone or his wallet.

A friend who’s in meetings all day and can’t check her phone — because, rude — is looking forward to the taptics triaging for her what’s really urgent.

A buddy who’s all-in on home automation can’t wait to say “Goodnight, Siri!” and have everything lock down and turn off for the night.

The Apple Watch is certainly going to be convenient and I can’t wait to see what developers come up with upon it’s release.

Launched on the App Store this week, Sync Solver allows Fitbit wearers to track all of the important information the wearable device calculates on a daily basis directly inside Apple’s own Health app without needing to use the dedicated Fitbit app.

So we can confidently say that Three is the UK’s best mobile network of 2014. Both on 3G and 4G Three completed more tests than did any other network. Three was the fastest network with excellent average and peak scores in our speed tests up and down the country.

A very good runner up to Three in the UK’s best mobile network of 2014 category was EE.

Since switching to Three from EE, I have been very impressed with their consistent performance and coverage but what stands Three out from the rest for me is the unlimited data package.

Yesterday, Apple released a new bundle of developer tools called WatchKit to help make third-party Apple Watch apps a reality. But for type lovers, WatchKit contained a nice little surprise: a folder containing 23 different variations of the Apple Watch system font, the first one Apple has designed in-house in almost 20 years. Even better, that typeface finally has a name: San Francisco.

Seemingly inspired by Helvetica and FF Din, San Francisco is designed specifically for smaller displays: there’s plenty of space between each letter, and Apple seems to be avoiding extraordinarily thin lettering that wouldn’t play well on already cramped watch screens. Yet as some have already noticed, San Francisco also looks gorgeous on Retina Displays as a replacement Mac default typeface.

You can download the necessary font files from the GitHub page, which are adapted versions of the files Apple made available, as they have to be changed slightly to work properly as a system font.

To install, the steps are quite simple.

Download the zipped font files.

Copy the 6 font files to /Library/Fonts on your Mac. (protip: press cmd+shift+g while in Finder to type the path directly.)

Run sudo chown root:wheel /Library/Fonts/System\ San\ Francisco* to set the proper ownership of the font files.

Repair Disk Permissions diskutil repairPermissions / (for good measure)Log out and log back in to apply the changes.

Step three and four requires use of the Terminal, so be careful when typing in the two commands. It just changes file permissions, so it’s difficult to go wrong. The Terminal will ask for an admin password, though, as changing permissions requires elevated privileges. Otherwise, it’s a simple case of moving files to a special directory. You can see what it looks like from the above screenshot.

If it turns out you want to go back to Helvetica, just delete the six files from the Fonts folder in Library and reboot. As an aside, it should also be possible to install San Francisco as the primary font on your iOS device, although it will require a jailbreak.

Apple has introduced a small but interesting tweak to the way it markets apps on the App Store. As you can see in the screenshot above, non-paid apps are now presented with the word ‘GET’ rather than ‘FREE’. While the reason for the change in how Apple is presenting non-paid apps isn’t clear, it’s likely due to the popularity of ‘freemium’ apps and in-app purchases, something that has been the source of controversy for Apple in the past…

Apple has taken a great deal of flack from customers and consumer protection groups through the years over apps marketed as free that push in-app purchases. The freemium model has been used in some cases to circumvent the lack of app trials on the App Store. For example, a developer may make an app free to download, but require an in-app purchase to unlock the app’s full functionality. The new ‘Get’ labels seem to address such a use case where previously ‘Free’ could be misleading.

I am not sure ‘Get’ is the right term to use here and maybe ‘download’ isn’t the right term either due to it already being used for your previously purchased apps but I certainly like it better than ‘Get’. I’d bet this term will get changed again in the near future.

Apple will bundle the subscription music service it acquired from Beats into its iOS operating system early next year, instantly making it available on hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads – and ramping up pressure on Spotify, the market leader in music streaming.

This seems pretty plausible especially as Jim Darlymple over at The Loop more or less confirmed it. Whether it will be a seperate app from iTunes is not clear at this point but one step at a time eh?

I’m pleased to report iCloud Drive document syncing is loads better with the latest updates. This morning I spent 30 minutes moving between my iPad and Mac on a large numbers spreadsheet and both devices were keeping up. In short, iCloud document syncing is manageable again. Third party apps, like Drafts and Mindnode, are also seeing the benefits of this update. If you’ve been waiting, or had a bad prior experience, update your Mac and iOS devices with yesterday’s updates and give it a try for yourself.

I too concur that iCloud syncing is now working back to normal in the iWork suites on iOS with the 8.1.1 update so if you have been having issues, this latest update is certainly a positive one.